Heart of Louisiana: The Mighty Mastodon

Tens of thousands of years ago, the landscape of Louisiana was drastically different.

“The water was tied up in the glaciers, so the oceans are about 300 to 400 feet lower than they are today. This would've been a high prairie area or marshy prairie area,” Mike Richard said.

With the ice-age environment came megafauna - large animals, many of them now extinct.

“Giant horned bison, camels, ground sloths that weighed over 3,000 pounds. They had tortoises that were the size of Volkswagens,” Richard said.

Richard owns Rip Van Winkle Gardens on Jefferson Island, which sits on top of one of Louisiana's coastal salt domes. It was a near-catastrophe here on Lake Peigneur that led to the discovery of the first bones in 1980. It happened when a drilling rig out on the lake punched a hole in an underground salt mine.

“All the water from the ground, from the lake, startedrunning down into this borehole and quickly enlarged it to the point where billions of gallons of water were sucked into the mine,” Richard said.

For 10 hours, the land collapsed as the lake was sucked dry. When the large crater filled again with water, the upheaval along the shoreline revealed long-buried skeletons. Richard first noticed what he thought was a rock jutting from an embankment. His 10-year-old son retrieved it.

“And when he picked it up, he said, ‘Daddy, it's not a rock, it's a tooth.’ We found a piece of jawbone where the root socketed into the jawbone,” Richard said.

The giant molar came from the mouth of a mastodon, an animal that's been extinct for 10,000 years.

“Well mastodons are similar to an elephant,” Richard said. “Here's a tusk that was into pieces, and it's interesting that the working end of the tusk is convex and it's obvious they were used as a tool for up routing plants.”

This is the jawbone and teeth from a tapir, a hog-like animal. These teeth come from a large ancient species of horse. When Richard was deepening this pond, he found more bones from another mastodon.

“This large tusk, it measures almost 9 inches in diameter and originally was in excess of 6 feet long. They were just laying buried in the ground for the last 30,000 years at least,” Richard said.

Most of these animals disappeared from coastal Louisiana as the planet warmed. But today, if you dig in the right place, you might just find a buried piece of prehistoric treasure.